AND ABOUT THE BIBLE, HE SAID... "The Old Testament is a book of many colors, written, edited,
and re-edited by many writers in the course of a millennium and containing
in itself a remarkable evolution from primitive authoritarianism and
clannishness to the idea of the radical freedom of humans and the brotherhood
of all people. The Old Testament is a revolutionary book; its theme
is the liberation of people from the incestuous ties to blood and soil,
from the submission to idols, from slavery, from powerful masters, to
freedom for the individual, for the nation, and for all of humankind.
It is the revolutionary character of the Old Testament which made it
a guide for the revolutionary christian sects before and after the Reformation.

"I do not look at the Bible as the "word of God", not only because
historical examination shows that it is a book written by men--different
kinds of men, living in different times-- but also because I am not
a theist. Yet, to me, it is an extraordinary book, expressing many norms
and principles that have maintained their validity throughout thousands
of years. It is a book which has proclaimed a vision for people that
is still valid and awaiting realization. It was not written by one man,
nor dictated by God; it expresses the genius of a people struggling
for life and freedom throughout many generations.

"The editors of the Bible did not always smooth out the contradictions
between the various sources they used. But they must have been men of
great insight and wisdom to transform the many parts into a unit reflecting
an evolutionary process whose contradictions are aspects of a whole.
Their editorship, and even the work of the sages who made the final
choice of the Holy Scriptures, is, in a broad sense, a work of authorship.

"The Old Testament is the document depicting the evolution of a small,
primitive nation, whose spiritual leaders insisted on the existence
of one God and on the nonexistence of idols, to a religion with faith
in a nameless God, in the final unification of all humans, in the complete
freedom of each individual."

AND ABOUT RADICAL
HUMANISM, HE SAID: "The interpretation of the Bible given in this book is that
of radical humanism. By radical humanism I refer to a global philosophy
which emphasizes the oneness of the human race, the capacity of each
individual to develop their own powers and to arrive at inner harmony
and at the establishment of a peaceful world.

"Radical humanism considers the goal of humankind to be that of complete
independence, and this implies penetrating through fictions and illusions
to a full awareness of reality. It implies, furthermore, a skeptical
attitude toward the use of force, precisely because during recorded
history it has been, and still is, force--creating fear--which has made
humans ready to take fiction for reality, illusions for truth. It was
force which made people incapable of independence and hence warped their
reason and emotions.

"If it is possible to discover the seeds of radical humanism in the
older sources of the Bible, it is only because we know the radical humanism
of Amos, of Socrates, of the Renaissance humanists, of the Enlightenment,
of Kant, herder, Lessing, Goethe, Marx, Schweitzer. The seed becomes
clearly recognizable only if one knows the flower; the earlier phase
is often to be interpreted by the later phase, even though, genetically,
the earlier phase precedes the later."

AND ABOUT JEWISH HISTORY,
HE SAID: "There is one more aspect of the radical humanist interpretation
that needs to be mentioned. Ideas, especially if they are the ideas
not only of a single individual but have become integrated into the
historical process, have their roots in the real life of society. Hence,
if one assumes that the idea of radical humanism is a major trend in
the biblical and post-biblical tradition, one must assume that basic
conditions existed throughout the history of the Jews which would have
given rise to the existence and growth of the humanistic tendency.

"Are there such fundamental conditions? I believe there are and that
it is not difficult to discover them. The Jews were in possession of
effective and impressive secular power for only a short time, in fact,
for only a few generations.

"After the reigns of David and Solomon, the pressure from the great
powers in the north and south grew to such dimensions that Judah and
Israel lived under the ever increasing threat of being conquered. And,
indeed, conquered they were, never to recover.

"Even when the Jews later had formal political independence, they
were a small and powerless satellite, subject to big powers. When the
Romans finally put an end to the state after R. Yohanan ben Zakkai went
over to the Roman side, asking only for permission to open an academy
in Jabne to train future generations of rabbinical scholars, a Judaism
without kings and priests emerged that had already been developing for
centuries behind a facade to which the Romans gave only the final blow.
"Those prophets who had denounced the idolatrous admiration for secular
power were vindicated by the course of history. Thus the prophetic teachings,
and not Solomon's splendor, became the dominant, lasting influence on
Jewish thought.

"From then on the Jews, as a nation, never again regained power. On
the contrary, throughout most of their history they suffered from those
who were able to use force. No doubt their position also could, and
did, give rise to national resentment, clannishness, arrogance; and
this is the basis for the other trend with Jewish history.

"What from a mundane standpoint was the tragedy of the Jews--the loss
of their country and their state--from the humanist standpoint was their
greatest blessing: being among the suffering and despised, they were
able to develop and uphold a tradition of humanism."

AND ABOUT CONCEPTS ARISING
OUT OF EXPERIENCE, HE SAID: "Words and concepts referring to phenomena related to psychic
or mental experience develop and grow--or deteriorate--with the person
to whose experience they refer. They change as the person changes; they
have a life as he or she has a life.

"There is simultaneously permanence and change in any living being;
hence, there is permanence and change in any concept reflecting the
experience of a living person. However, that concepts have their own
lives, and that they grow, can be understood only if the concepts are
not separated from the experience to which they give expression. If
the concept becomes alienated--that is, separated from the experience
to which it refers--it loses its reality and is transformed into an
artifact of a person's mind.

"The fiction is thereby created that anyone who uses the concept is
referring to the substratum of experience underlying it. Once this happens--and
this process of the alienation of concepts is the rule rather than the
exception--the idea expressing an experience has been transformed into
an ideology that usurps the place of the underlying reality within the
living human being."

AND ABOUT HISTORICALLY
CONDITIONED EXPRESSIONS, HE SAID: "History then becomes a history of ideologies rather than the
history of concrete, real people who are the producers of their ideas.

"The foregoing considerations are important if one wants to understand
the concept of God. They are also important in order to understand the
position of this book. I believe that the concept of God was a historically
conditioned expression of an inner experience.

"I believe that the concept of "God" was conditioned by the presence
of a socio-political structure in which tribal chiefs or kings have
supreme power. The supreme value is conceptualized as analogous to the
supreme power in society. "God" is one of many different poetic expressions
of the highest value in humanism, not a reality in itself.

"To which reality of human experience does the concept of God refer?
Is there some experiential substratum common to the concept as used
by various people, or might it be that while such a common ground exists
in the case of some, it does not exist with regard to others?"

AND ABOUT THE LEAP
FROM EXPERIENCE TO ABSTRACT IDEAS, HE SAID: "That an idea, the conceptual expression of a human experience,
is so prone to be transformed into an ideology has its reasons not only
in a person's fear of committing oneself fully to the experience, but
also in the very nature of the relationship between experience and idea
(conceptualization).

"A concept can never adequately express the experience it refers to.
It points to it, but it is not it. (A concept is likened to the finger
which points to the moon--it is not the moon.) A concept and a symbol
have the great advantage that they permit people to communicate their
experiences; they have the tremendous disadvantage that they lend themselves
easily to an alienated use."

ABOUT THE HUMAN QUEST FOR
CERTAINTY, HE SAID: "Another factor that contributes to the development of alienation
and 'ideologization' seems to be an inherent tendency in human thought
to strive for systematization and completeness. (One root for this tendency
probably lies in our quest for certainty--a quest that is understandable
enough in view of the precarious nature of human existence.)

"When we know some fragments of reality we want to complete them in
such a way that they "make sense" in a systematic way. Yet by the very
nature of the limitations of people we always have only "fragmentary"
knowledge, and never complete knowledge.

"What we tend to do then is to manufacture some additional pieces
which we add to the fragments to make of them all whole, a system. Frequently
the awareness of the qualitative difference between the "fragments"
and "the additions" is missing because of the intensity of the wish
for certainty.

"In many scientific systems we find a mixture of true insights into
reality, with fictitious pieces added that are intended to produce a
systematic whole. Only at a later point of development is it clearly
recognized which were the true but fragmentary pieces of knowledge and
which the "padding" that was added to give the system greater plausibility.
The same process occurs in political ideology."

AND ABOUT ABSOLUTE RELIGIOUS
CONCEPTS, HE SAID: "In the history of religious concepts we find the same process
occurring. At the time when humans had a fragmentary knowledge of the
possibility of solving the problems of human existence by the full development
of human powers; when people sensed that they could find harmony progressing
to the full development of love and reason, rather than by the tragic
attempt to regress to nature and eliminate reason, they gave this new
vision, this unknown quantity "x", many names: Brahman, Tao, Nirvana,
God.

"This development took place all over the world in the millennium
between 1500 B.C. and 500 B.C. in Egypt, Palestine, India, China and
Greece (Karl Jasper's concept of the Axial Age). The nature of these
different concepts depended on the economic, social, and political bases
of the respective cultures and social classes, and on the patterns of
thought arising from them.

"But the "x", the goal, was soon converted into an absolute; a system
was built around it; the blank spaces were filled with many fictitious
assumptions, until what is common in the vision almost disappeared under
the weight of the fictitious "additions" produced by each system."

AND ABOUT THE RISE OF
BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL, HE SAID: "Any progress in science, in political ideas, in religion and
in philosophy tends to create ideologies which compete and fight with
each other. Furthermore, this process is aided by the fact that as soon
as the thought system becomes the nucleus of an organization, the bureaucrats
arise who, in order to keep power and control, wish to emphasize the
differences rather than that which is shared, and who are therefore
interested in making the fictitious additions as important, or more
so, than the original fragments.

"Thus philosophy, religion, political ideas, and sometimes even science
are transformed into ideologies, controlled by the respective bureaucrats.

"The concept of God in the Old Testament has its own life and evolution
correspomding to the evolution of a people within a span of twelve hundred
years. There is a common element of experience referred to by the concept
of God, but there is also a constant change occurring in this experience
and hence in the meaning of the word and the concept.

"What is common is the idea that neither nature nor artifacts constitute
the ultimate reality or the highest value, but that there is only the
ONE who represents the supreme value and the supreme goal for humans:
the goal of finding union with the world through full development of
specifically human capacities of love and reason. "The God of Abraham
and the God of Isaiah share the essential qualities of the One, yet
they are as different from each other as are an uneducated, primitive,
nomadic tribal chief and a universalistic thinker living in one of the
centers of world culture a millennium later."